Oxygen therapy is the administration of oxygen as a therapeutic modality. It is widely used for a variety of purposes in both chronic and acute patient care as it is essential for cell metabolism, and in turn, tissue oxygenation is essential for all physiological functions. Oxygen therapy should be used to benefit the patient by increasing the supply of oxygen to the lungs and thereby increasing the availability of oxygen to the body tissues, especially when the patient is suffering from hypoxia and/or hypoxemia. Oxygen therapy may be used both in applications in hospital or in home care. The main home care application of oxygen therapy is for patients with severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
Oxygen may be administered in a number of ways. A preferable way of oxygen administration is by using a so called on demand generation of oxygen. Referring to this, commercial solutions, so-called oxygen concentrators or separators, respectively, are widely known. These oxygen concentrators mostly separate oxygen from an oxygen comprising gas, so that the oxygen is provided on demand, i.e. directly before use.
A task of such oxygen concentrators, or oxygen separators, respectively, known in the art is to deal with the temperature dependency of the oxygen separation capacity of the respective oxygen separation sorbent.
Known from US 20060048644 A1 is a pressure swing adsorption system. Such a pressure swing adsorption system comprises an air supply; a compressor for receiving and compressing the air supply, providing a compressed air supply; and less than six molecular sieve chambers having molecular sieve material therewithin for separating the compressed air supply into a concentrated gas component; wherein the system has a recovery rate of the concentrated gas component of greater than approximately 30%. In order to deal with compressed air having a higher temperature than ambient air, the compressed air according to this document travels along the length of a multi-chamber canister which acts as a heat exchange for cooling compressed air prior to delivery to a respective molecular sieve.
There is, however, still the need for improving the oxygen separation performance of oxygen separation devices especially with respect to temperature influence and especially with regard to storing or using an oxygen separator at highly elevated temperatures.